In Good Natured Frans de Waal, ethologist and primatologist, asks us to reconsider human morality in light of moral aspects that can be identified in animals. Within the complex negotiations of human society, a moral action may involve thoughts and feelings of guilt, reciprocity, obligation, expectations, rules, or community concern. De Waal finds these aspects of morality prevalent in other animal societies, mostly primate, and suggests that the two philosophical camps supporting nature and nurture may have to be disbanded in order to adequately understand human morality. A theoretician, de Waal is meticulous in his research, cautious not to extrapolate too much from his findings, and logically sound in his arguments. He also writes with precision and a flair for the dramatic, carrying readers along with graceful ease and vivid examples. Amazon

Even if he has some disagreements with Richard Dawkins, Professor Steven Rose explains the crucial importence of natural selection from his point of view. He believes in we are trapped in a way of thinking on genes which comes out of Mendelian history.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Why do fools fall in love? Why does a man's annual salary, on average, increase $600 with each inch of his height? When a crack dealer guns down a rival, how is he just like Alexander Hamilton, whose face is on the ten-dollar bill? How do optical illusions function as windows on the human soul? Cheerful, cheeky, occasionally outrageous MIT psychologist Steven Pinker answers all of the above and more in his marvelously fun, awesomely informative survey of modern brain science. Pinker argues that Darwin plus canny computer programs are the key to understanding ourselves--but he also throws in apt references to Star Trek, Star Wars, The Far Side, history, literature, W. C. Fields, Mozart, Marilyn Monroe, surrealism, experimental psychology, and Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty and his 888 children. If How the Mind Works were a rock show, tickets would be scalped for $100. This book deserved its spot as Number One on bestseller lists. Amazon

Sunday, June 27, 2010

A person who is imprisoned in a basement for more than thirty years and sexually abused by his cruel mother in this very room. When he gets a chance to go out, now he turns to an outsider in the middle of the unknown. This is the semi-surreal journey of a man-child Bubby. The film may not be to everyone's taste, especially the first thirty minutes is very dark and disturbing. The story is not linear, most of the time confusing but thought-provoking and intriguing. It has a very strong language against the religious subjects, it's totally godless, sometimes as harsh as Raoul Vaneigem's language. Although some extreme scenes, the main story is surprisingly very humane and touching. Very good example of a human can be good without religious superstitions.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

An allegorical film about the excesses of fundamentalism, to be screened at the International Freethought Film Festival. It is going to be shown on the official site for a limited time period starting July 6, 2010.

In this weird and ingenious game, you join the dark side to hide the sexual crimes committed by priests before all of them get arrested. You have to use the special task force of the Vatican to silence the witnesses!

Friday, June 25, 2010

"In Genome Ridley continues with his expansion into larger themes, as he takes us on a roller coaster ride through the very foundation of life: DNA" —Michael Shermer

Science writer Matt Ridley has found a way to tell someone else's story without being accused of plagiarism. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters delves deep within your body (and, to be fair, Ridley's too) looking for dirt dug up by the Human Genome Project. Each chapter pries one gene out of its chromosome and focuses on its role in our development and adult life, but also goes further, exploring the implications of genetic research and our quickly changing social attitudes toward this information. Genome shies away from the "tedious biochemical middle managers" that only a nerd could love and instead goes for the A-material: genes associated with cancer, intelligence, sex (of course), and more. Amazon

"J," "P," "E," and "D" are the names scholars have given to some authors of the Bible, and, as such, they are very important letters to a lot of people. Churches have died and been born, and millions of people have lost faith or found it, because of the last two centuries of debate about who, exactly, wrote the canonical texts of Christianity and Judaism. Richard Elliott Friedman's survey of this debate, in Who Wrote the Bible?, may be the best written popular book about this question. Without condescension or high-flown academic language, Friedman carefully describes the history of textual criticism of the Bible--a subject on which his authority is unparalleled. But this book is not just smart. Perhaps even more impressive than Friedman's erudition is his sensitivity to the power of textual criticism to influence faith. Amazon

"According to David (an Anglican priest) all of these fundamental tenets of Christianity, virgin birth, resurrection, life after death, did not happen at all. Seems to me that David's version of Christianity is virtually atheism. Science provides the facts about the world, religion gives us the music, the pictures, and tells the stories of human nature."

Christianity is now almost 2000 years old. It has been transformed from a small Jewish sect in the Middle East to the biggest and most influential religion in the history of mankind. In this series, the eight different commentators deals with the different aspects of Christianity.

This is the story of the origins and consequences of Christian belief, antisemitism, bloodiest wars and a great hegemonic movement against the reason.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Written by Salvatore Pertutti and freely distributed via salvatore-pertutti.com, the book shares the author's reflections on the subject and shows the intolerant, sexist and homophobic face of the Bible and the Koran. It is currently available in French, English and Italian, but other translations such as Arabic and Spanish are on the way.

In 1973, Carl Sagan published The Cosmic Connection, a daring view of the universe, which rapidly became a classic work of popular science and inspired a generation of scientists and enthusiasts. This seminal work is reproduced here for a whole new generation to enjoy. In Sagan's typically lucid and lyrical style, he discusses many topics from astrophysics and solar system science, to colonization, terraforming and the search for extraterrestrials. Sagan conveys his own excitement and wonder, and relates the revelations of astronomy to the most profound human problems and concerns: issues that are just as valid today as they were thirty years ago. Amazon

File size: 5 MB
Format: pdf/epub/mobi

http://www9.zippyshare.com/v/37130328/file.html
or
http://ulozto.net/xaEtepG/carl-sagan-the-cosmic-connection-rar

From acclaimed director Kirby Dick (HBO's Showgirls: Glitz & Angst, Cinemax's Chain Camera and The End), this Academy Award-nominated and Sundance-selected feature documentary tells the deeply personal story of a man who confronts the trauma of past sexual abuse by a local priest, only to find his decision shatters his relationships with his family, community and faith. Amazon

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Biologist Jonathan Kingdon explains geographic divergence in animals and importance of hands in hominid evolution. Don't miss to see them while Kingdon and Dawkins were pretending knuckle-walking apes to demonstrate the foraging behavior. So cute!

Thursday, June 17, 2010

This book demonstrates that the stories and themes of the Bible were part of the great mythic systems of the ancient world by u sing comparative mythology, tell tale verses in the Bible and archaeology. The abstract God of modern monotheistic Judaism, Christianity and Islam is a comparatively recent creation. In later times the myth of a messianic deliverer was combined with that of the pagan god-man who suffered a horrible, excruciating death but was physically resurrected to produce the Christ myth. Amazon

File size: 21 MB
Format: pdf

http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/62812400/file.html
or
http://www.ulozto.net/x44CNLD/tim-callahan-secret-origins-of-the-bible-rar

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

"One of the hottest new topics in intellectual life: the psychology and biology of morals...full of fascinating new material."
—Steven Pinker

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard University psychologist, wants to do for morality what Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky did for language—he wants to discover the universal "moral grammar." Chomsky suggested that humans are born with a "universal grammar," a cognitive capacity that helps us acquire language and shapes the way we apply language rules. Hauser thinks our moral grammar works the same way, helping us isolate moral lessons from our culture and make judgments about right and wrong. In Moral Minds, Hauser reviews what we already know about innate human faculties—for instance, that even infants seem to understand that people and animals have intentions, whereas inanimate objects do not. And he presents evidence that our universal morality is probably based on rules about fairness, proportionality and reciprocity, among other things. The material is captivating and ranges from philosophy to anthropology to psychology, including some of Hauser’s own original work. Scientific American

File size: 3 MB
Format: pdf

http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/4831772/file.html
or
http://ulozto.net/xdm7got7/marc-hauser-moral-minds-rar

Dawkins inverviews one of the rational religious persons, Father George Coyne. He rejects intelligent design and accepts the importance of science but (the bad part begins) still thinks that we need faith to explain other things.A short clip from the interview:

Richard Dawkins visits Randal Keynes who is author of Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution and also the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Keynes shows some elegant pieces (such as Annie's beaufitul scrapbook) from his heritage and reveals the background story of Charles Darwin.

For more than thirty years Dr. Armand Nicholi has taught a popular course at Harvard on the question of God. He has dealt with the writings of the two most profound thinkers of the twentieth century: C. S Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Arguably Freud is the most influential spokesman for the secular world view and Lewis is the most influential spokesman for the spiritual world view. This four part series, based on the same name book The Question of God, illustrates the different ideas of Freud and Lewis using dramatic acting. Dr. Armand Nicholi invited seven people, including Michael Shermer, from different views to discuss issues of faith and doubt throughout the series.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

I share an episode of award-winning series Inside Nature's Giants because one of the guest experts is Richard Dawkins. As he cited in his very last book The Greatest Show on Earth, he becomes a participant in giraffe dissection at the Royal Veterinary College and demonstrates the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe as proof of natural selection and an imperfection of evolution.

Richard Dawkins discusses sperm donation procedures and genetic heritage with three women. Interestingly the women never heard of Dawkins before and they have no idea what atheism is. Maybe donors must choose women?

Power, sex, violence and kindness: these four broad-spectrum categories encompass much of human behavior, so it's only fitting that they're also the primary subject material for Frans de Waal's (The Ape and The Sushi Master) book Our Inner Ape. The few (but deeply detailed) chapters are a mesmerizing read that spans biology, child psychology, postmodern theorists and fundamental morality, using tales of stern chimps, and sexy bonobos to examine humans' place between them. In the process, he examines why we need to know our place in the world, how our body language communicates feelings, and where the roots of empathy lie in mammalian life. Amazon

Friday, June 4, 2010

"The god, in human form, still carried at first the head of an animal; later on he was wont to assume the guise of the same animal. Still later the animal became sacred to him and his favourite companion or else he was reputed to have slain the animal, when he added its name to his own. Between the totem animal and the god the hero made his appearance; this was often an early stage of deification. The idea of a Highest Being seems to have appeared early; at first it was shadowy and devoid of any connection with the daily interests of mankind. As the tribes and people were knit together into larger unities and the gods also become organized into families and hierarchies. Often one of them was elevated to be the overlord of gods and men. The next step, to worship only one God, was taken hesitatingly, and at long last the decision was made to concede all power to one God only and not to suffer any other gods beside him."

In this, his last book, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman and that the Jewish religion was in fact an Egyptian import to Palestine. Freud also writes that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, in a reenactment of the primal crime against the father. Lingering guilt for this crime, Freud says, is the reason Christians understand Jesus' death as sacrificial. "The 'redeemer' could be none other than the one chief culprit, the leader of the brother-band who had overpowered the father." Hence the basic difference between Judaism and Christianity: "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son." Freud's arguments are extremely imaginative, and his distinction between reality and fantasy, as always, is very loose. If only as a study of wrong-headedness, however, it's fascinating reading for those who want to explore the psychological impulses governing the historical relationship between Christians and Jews. Amazon

We are the products of numerous daily interactions. Billions of neurochemical reactions are firing every single second of our lives. In us reason and emotion are frequently a war. Michael Mosley explains how the brain works referring to the sciences of brain anatomy and psychology.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide.

In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.

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